Daughter of Fortune (16 page)

By December he couldn't take any more. As he was copying the particulars of a cargo that had arrived in the port, as he did meticulously every day, he altered the figures in the registry, then destroyed the original documents of off-loading. Through the art of bookkeeping sleight of hand, he caused several boxes of revolvers and bullets originating in New York to disappear. For the next three nights he avoided the night watch, jimmied the locks, and sneaked into the warehouse of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd. to steal the contents of those boxes. He had to make several trips because the booty was heavy. First he filled his pockets with guns, and strapped others to his arms and legs beneath his clothing; then he carried out sacks of bullets. Several times he was nearly caught by the night guards, but luck was with him and each time he slipped away in time. He knew he had a couple of weeks before anyone would claim the boxes and discover the theft; he supposed, too, that it would be all too easy to follow the trail of the missing documents and altered figures to the guilty person, but by then he would be on the high seas. And when he had made his own fortune he would return every last cent, with interest, since the only reason for committing such a deed, he repeated a thousand times, was his desperation. This was a matter of life and death. Life as he understood it lay in California; to stay trapped in Chile was to condemn himself to a slow death. He sold part of his loot at a ridiculous price in dives in the port and the rest among his friends in the Santos Tornero bookshop after making them swear they would guard his secret. Those hotheaded idealists had never held a weapon in their hands but they had spent years preparing verbally for a Utopian revolt against the conservative government. It would have been a betrayal of their propositions not to buy the black-market revolvers, especially at such bargain prices. Joaquín Andieta kept two revolvers for himself, determined to use them to shoot his way out if he had to, but he said nothing to his closest friends about his plans to leave. That night in the back room of the bookshop, he, too, placed his right hand over his heart and swore, in the name of the republic, that he would give his life for democracy and justice. The next morning he bought a third-class passage on the first schooner scheduled to sail north, along with a few sacks of toasted flour, beans, rice, sugar, jerked horse meat, and bacon, which if doled out with parsimony could get him through the journey. He bound his few remaining
reales
around his waist with a tight sash.

On the night of December twenty-second, he kissed Eliza and his mother good-bye, and the next morning set off for California.

Mama Fresia discovered the love letters by chance when she was digging onions in her narrow garden in the patio and the pitchfork hit a tin box. She didn't know how to read, but she only had to glance at them to know what she had found. She was tempted to take them to Miss Rose, because just holding them in her hand she could sense the threat; she would have sworn that the red ribbon-tied packet throbbed like a living heart, but her affection for Eliza was stronger than prudence and instead of going to her
patrona
she put the letters back in the biscuit tin, hid it beneath her full black skirts, and with a heavy sigh went to the girl's room. She found Eliza sitting in a chair, her back straight and her hands clasped in her lap as if she were at mass, staring out her window at the sea, so filled with anguish that the air around her felt dense and heavy with premonitions. Mama Fresia set the box on Eliza's knees and stood waiting for an explanation—in vain.

“The man is a devil. He will bring you nothing but trouble,” she said finally.

“It has already begun. He left six weeks ago for California, and I haven't had my period.”

Mama Fresia slumped down on the floor with her legs crossed, as she did when her bones could not carry her another step, and began to rock back and forth, moaning softly.

“Quiet, Mamacita, Miss Rose can hear us,” Eliza plead.

“A child of the gutter! A
huacho
! what are we going to do, child? What are we going to do?” Mama Fresia could not stop lamenting.

“I am going to marry him.”

“How, if he's gone?”

“I will have to find him.”

“Ay! Sweet blessed Jesus! Have you lost all your senses? I will give you something and in a few days you will be like new.”

So Mama Fresia brewed borage tea and made up a potion of chicken shit dissolved in black beer, which she made Eliza drink three times a day; she also made her soak in sulfur baths and applied mustard compresses to her stomach. The result was that Eliza turned yellow and went around bathed in a sticky sweat that smelled like rotted gardenias, but after a week there were still no signs of a miscarriage. Mama Fresia concluded that the creature was male and obviously had a curse on it, and that was why it clung so tightly to its mother's insides. This state of affairs was beyond her, it was the work of the devil and only the woman who had taught her, the
machi
, could deal with a problem of this magnitude. That same evening she asked her
patrona'
s permission to be gone for a while, and once again she walked the steep path to the ravine to stand dejected before the ancient blind witch woman. As a gift, she took her two jars of quince preserves and a stuffed duck flavored with rosemary.

The
machi
listened to the latest developments, nodding wearily, as if she already knew what had happened.

“I told you before that a fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst.”

“Can you do something so my little girl can cast out the
huacho?
”

“
That
I can do. But that won't cure her. She will have to follow the man.”

“He went far away to look for gold.”

“After love, the worst fixation is gold,” the
machi
intoned.

Mama Fresia understood that it would be impossible to get Eliza out of the house and take her to the
machi's
ravine, let her do her work, and get the girl back home without Miss Rose finding out. The
machi
was a hundred years old and hadn't left her wretched hut in fifty of them, so neither was she going to come to the Sommers'. There was no other way, she would do it herself. The
machi
gave her a slender coligüe twig and a dark, stinking pomade, then explained in detail how to dab the sprig in the salve and insert it in Eliza. Then she taught her the words of the incantation that would free the creature from the devil and at the same time protect the mother's life. Mama Fresia would have to perform this ceremony on a Friday night, the one day in the week that was authorized for doing it, she warned. Mama Fresia went home very late and very tired, with the coligüe and pomade under her mantle.

“Pray, child, because in two nights' time I will do the cure,” she told Eliza when she took in her breakfast chocolate.

Captain John Sommers disembarked in Valparaíso on the day set by the
machi
. It was the second Friday in the full summer of February. The bay was seething with activity, with fifty ships at anchor and others waiting their turn outside the port to come in. As always, Jeremy, Rose, and Eliza were at the dock to welcome this admirable Sommers, who as usual was loaded down with trinkets, stories, and gifts. Average citizens, who had appointments to visit the ships and buy contraband, blended in with seamen, travelers, stevedores, and customs employees, while a group of prostitutes, stationed at a certain distance, was studying the lay of the land. In recent months, ever since news of gold had stirred the greed of men on every shore of the world, ships had entered and left at a crazed pace, and the brothels couldn't keep up. The most intrepid women, however, were not satisfied with the steady stream of business in Valparaíso and had calculated how much more they could earn in California, where, if what you heard was true, there were two hundred men for every woman. In the port, people jockeyed around carts, draft animals, and bundles; the air was filled with a babel of tongues, ships' horns, and guards' whistles, and the smell of fish baking in great baskets in the sun mixed with the stench of animal excrement and human sweat. Miss Rose, holding a vanilla-perfumed handkerchief to her nose, scrutinized the passengers in the dinghies, looking for her favorite brother as Eliza sniffed the air in quick gulps, trying to separate and identify the odors. She was the first to sight Captain Sommers. She was so relieved that she almost burst out crying. She had been waiting for him for several months, sure that he alone would understand the anguish of her frustrated love. She hadn't said a word about Joaquín Andieta to Miss Rose, much less Jeremy Sommers, but she was sure that her seafaring uncle, whom nothing could surprise or frighten, would help her.

The moment the captain stepped onto dry land, an exhilarated Eliza and Miss Rose threw themselves on him; he clasped them both in his formidable arms, lifted them off the ground, and whirled like a top to the gleeful shouts of Miss Rose and the protests of Eliza, who was about to throw up. Jeremy Sommers greeted his brother with a handshake, asking himself how it was possible that he hadn't changed a hair in the last twenty years and was as rollicking as ever.

“What's this, my little pumpkin? You look a little peaky,” the captain said, examining Eliza.

“I ate some green fruit, Uncle,” she said, dizzy and leaning against him to keep from falling.

“I know you two didn't come down here to welcome me. What you want is to buy some perfumes, I'll wager? I'll tell you who has the best, straight from the heart of Paris.”

At that moment, a foreigner walking by bumped the captain with his suitcase, which he was carrying on his back. John Sommers swung around, incensed, but when he recognized the culprit jokingly shouted one of his characteristic curses, and grabbed his arm.

“Come meet my family, Chino,” he called cordially.

Eliza stared openly at the man because she had never seen an Asian close up and at last she had before her a citizen of China, the fabulous country that figured in so many of her uncle's tales. This was a man of uncertain age, rather tall compared to Chileans, although beside the hearty English captain he looked like a boy.

He walked without grace, had the smooth face and slender body of a youth, and an ancient expression in his obliquely set eyes. His doctoral restraint contrasted with a childlike laugh that burst from the bottom of his chest when Sommers spoke to him. He was wearing trousers cut off at the shin, a loose muslin smock, a sash about his waist in which had tucked a large knife, cloth slippers and a beat-up straw hat, and a long braid trailed down his back. He greeted them with several nodding bows, without setting down his suitcase or meeting anyone's eyes. Miss Rose and Jeremy Sommers, uncomfortable at the familiarity with which their brother was treating a person of obviously inferior rank, did not know what to do, and responded with a brief nod. To Miss Rose's horror, Eliza held out her hand, but the man pretended not to see it.

“This is Tao Chi'en, the worst cook I've ever had, but he knows how to cure almost any ailment—that's the only reason I didn't make him walk the plank,” the captain joked.

Tao Chi'en made a new series of little bows, laughed for no apparent reason, and then backed away. Eliza wondered if he understood English. Behind the backs of the two women, John Sommers whispered to his brother that this Chinaman could sell him the best-quality opium and powdered rhinoceros horn for impotence, in case one day he decided to break the bad habit of celibacy. Hiding behind her fan, Eliza listened, intrigued.

That afternoon in the house, at tea time, the captain handed out the gifts he had brought: English shaving soap, a set of Toledo steel scissors, and Havana cigars for his brother, tortoiseshell combs and a Manila shawl for Rose, and, as always, a jewel for Eliza's trousseau. This time it was a pearl necklace, which she thanked him for profusely and put in her jewel box along with the others he had given her. Thanks to Miss Rose's obstinacy and her uncle's generosity, her dowry chest was filling up with treasures.

“This business of a trousseau seems a bit foolish, especially when there's no bridegroom in hand,” the captain joked. “Or maybe there is one on the horizon?”

Eliza exchanged a terrified glance with Mama Fresia, who had just at that moment brought in the tea tray. The captain said nothing, but asked himself whether his sister Rose had noticed the changes in Eliza. So what was feminine intuition good for, anyway?

They spent the rest of the evening listening to the captain's wondrous stories about California, even though he hadn't been there since the discovery of gold and the only thing he could say about San Francisco was that it wasn't much of a town but that it did sit on the most beautiful bay in the world. The brouhaha about gold was all that anyone was talking about in Europe and the United States, and the news had reached even the distant shores of Asia. His ship was crammed with passengers on their way to California, men of all ages and conditions, ignorant of the most elementary notion of mining; many had never seen a fleck of gold in their lives. There was no comfortable or quick way to get to San Francisco; a sailing ship took months, under the most precarious conditions, the captain explained, but traveling across the American continent, defying the immensity of the land and the Indian raids, took longer, and there was even less chance of getting there alive. Those who came by ship via Panama crossed the isthmus first in long boats along rivers roiling with predators and then on muleback through deep jungle. When they reached the Pacific Coast they took another ship north, having endured devilish heat, poisonous reptiles, mosquitoes, and plagues of cholera and yellow fever, to say nothing of unspeakable human wickedness. Travelers who had been spared falling off cliffs on their mounts and had survived the dangers of the swamps to reach the other ocean found themselves victims of bandits who robbed them of their belongings or mercenaries who charged a fortune to take them to San Francisco, piling them like cattle onto ships coming apart at the seams.